I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
My parents were serious working musicians, but they were not stars - not like pop stars that you have now. They had to make a living and that meant touring, working hard, going on the road - and we were roped in.
I always vaguely knew I wanted to perform, but I haven't got the greatest singing voice and my dancing isn't up to scratch. Acting was really the only alternative. My parents have been really supportive throughout.
I know plenty of Hollywood kids who still struggle with being whole. Their lives are never fully their own - always in the grip of a parent who put celebrity ahead of them.
Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.
The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.
My first job paid well for a young attorney. I was making over $50,000, which was more than either of my parents had ever made. I thought I was rich.
I didn't have parents who were, you know, racing to get a reality television show, you know? Or looking to benefit in some way from their daughter's fame.
When I ride the subway back and forth, sometimes I look at the other passengers and wonder if any of them are children who have been adopted or parents who have adopted.
And I think that's righteous, I think that's what parents want to know. They want to know what's going right in the school, and what needs improvement, and that's what this law does.
I was lucky enough that my parents knew about World Cup skiing, so since I was really little, we were watching World Cup winning runs.
I can't say that I've ever tried to hurt someone or humiliate them intentionally. My parents raised me to always be the bigger person or to treat others the way you want to be treated.
There is a real opportunity right now as parents and grandparents to come up with a plan that leaves our kids with something better than we have; that is, an opportunity to own, build, and grow a nest egg of their own.
Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.
The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best
The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders...
My parents paid me small amounts for cleaning my room or cleaning the dishes and stuff, but I never really had a real job before I started on my professional tennis career.
I think something that really shocked me as a nanny were parents who sort of assumed the worst from the get-go. People who didn't accept the benefit of the doubt.
I was born in my parents' bedroom on January 16. The World Almanac says it was 1909. I say it was 1912. But what difference does it make as long as I feel 33?
With my first pay cheque I sent my parents to Jamaica, so they actually got passports! They're pretty grounded; it wasn't until they saw the trailer for 'Battleship' that they were like, 'Ooh, this is a big movie, isn't it?'
Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different
